Otter Stretch

Hold still. That’s the whole game.

A short daily stretching game for people who can’t touch their toes. Settle into a stretch you can comfortably stay in, and your body steers the otter. Holding steady is what scores.

That corridor is live. Move your pointer, and the wobble is yours. That corridor is live. Drag it, and the wobble is yours.

It opens by asking what’s tight.

Whatever you pick, it builds a three-stretch routine, names it after what you asked for, and puts it on the front page. You can reorder it, cut it down, or ignore it and pick a single stretch instead.

How a session goes

Nothing here asks you to go deeper.

Points come from how steadily you hold the position you picked yourself. There is no depth term in the score at all.

That isn’t modesty. Bouncing at the end of your range is how beginners hurt themselves, and an app that paid you for it would be the problem rather than the workout. So pushing further earns nothing. It only makes you wobble more, and wobbling is what costs you gaps.

What does change is your range, and the app is deliberate about when it mentions it. A single day’s reading moves around ten percent on the same body in the same room, against real improvement of a few degrees a month — so a number after every session would show somebody who had stretched faithfully for three weeks that they had got worse. Instead it waits for five good sessions of one stretch, takes the middle one, and then holds that number still for a fortnight.

Ten stretches

Standing, kneeling and on the floor. Each one shows you where the phone goes and says the steps aloud before the clock starts. A session is one stretch or a routine of three, and either way it is under ten minutes.

Nothing you do here leaves the phone.

Otter Stretch follows your position with the camera. Video never leaves your phone.

There is no account, no sign-in and no sync — not yet-to-come, but by decision. Your position is read on the device with Apple’s own Vision framework, and your history is a file in the app’s own storage. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.